Читать книгу Notes on a Nervous Planet - Matt Haig - Страница 10

A conversation, about a year ago

I WAS STRESSED out.

I was walking around in circles, trying to win an argument on the internet. And Andrea was looking at me. Or I think Andrea was looking at me. It was hard to tell, as I was looking at my phone.

‘Matt? Matt?’

‘Uh. Yeah?’

‘What’s up?’ she asked, in the kind of despairing voice that develops with marriage. Or marriage to me.

‘Nothing.’

‘You haven’t looked up from your phone in over an hour. You’re just walking around, banging into furniture.’

My heart was racing. There was a tightness in my chest. Fight or flight. I felt cornered and threatened by someone on the internet who lived over 8,000 miles away from me and who I would never meet, but who was still managing to ruin my weekend. ‘I’m just getting back to something.’

‘Matt, get off there.’

‘I just—’

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

‘Matt!’

An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me in the passenger seat. I wasn’t on my phone, but I had a tight hold of it, for security, like a nun clutching her rosary.

‘Matt, are you okay?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘You look lost. You look like you used to look, when . . .’

She stopped herself saying ‘when you had depression’ but I knew what she meant. And besides, I could feel anxiety and depression around me. Not actually there but close. The memory of it something I could almost touch in the stifling air of the car.

‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine . . .’

Within a week I was lying on my sofa, falling into my eleventh bout of anxiety.